Do poor children grow up to be more trustworthy than rich kids?

By Stephen Beech

People who grew up in poverty are more likely to be trusted, according to new research.

Modest childhoods inspire more trust than privileged upbringings, suggest the findings.

Lead researcher Kristin Laurin, a psychology professor at the University of British Columbia in Canada, said: "Trust is essential for healthy relationships.

"Without it, romantic partnerships can fail, workplaces can suffer and social divisions can grow.

“But what makes people trust someone in the first place?”

To find out, researchers ran a series of experiments involving more than 1,900 participants.

The team explored whether someone's social class - either while growing up or currently - affects how trustworthy they appear to strangers.

In one experiment, participants were asked to play a trust game with what they thought were other real people, but were actually fictional profiles.

Each participant filled out a profile and received copies of profiles from their “group.”

Some fake profiles described people who grew up with less money, such as working part-time.

Others described more privileged backgrounds, such as going to private school or taking holidays abroad.

In the game, participants - known as “trusters” - started with 10 raffle tickets for a drawing for two $100 gift cards.

They had the option to transfer any number of these raffle tickets to one of the fictional players in their group, known as “trustees”.

Trusters were told any tickets transferred to a trustee would then be tripled, and the trustee could decide to return any number of those tickets to the truster.

The study looked at trust as a behaviour -putting oneself at the mercy of the other player.

How many raffle tickets participants transferred to another player indicated how much they behaviourally trusted that player.

The study also looked at trust as an expectation - believing the other player would be trustworthy.

Participants were asked, “If you gave all 10 tickets to this person, they would have 30. How many do you think they would give back?”

In similar experiments, the research team adjusted the fake profiles to suggest the trustees’ current socio-economic status and asked participants to rate the morality of the other players.

People tended to show more behavioural trust toward individuals from lower-income backgrounds, whether past or present, according to the findings published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

But they only believed a player was more trustworthy when the player grew up in a lower-income household.

Laurin said, “Our research shows that people draw a clear line between someone's childhood and their current situation.

“They generally saw people who grew up in lower-class homes as more moral and trustworthy.

"While they sometimes acted as if they trusted people who are currently lower class, they didn’t always believe those people would honour that trust.”

Laurin says the findings suggest that people might want to be "strategic" about how they present themselves in social situations where trust is a component.

She said: “If you’ve always been wealthy, for example, you might want to downplay that history and focus on the now, whereas if you’ve always struggled financially, making it clear that you grew up with humble roots might be more to your advantage."

Laurin noted that while the study shows a preference for trusting those from lower-income backgrounds, especially those who grew up that way - it didn’t ask whether those people are actually more trustworthy.

She added: “We didn’t examine whether a person’s childhood or current class background actually influences their behaviour.

“That’s a question for future studies - especially to understand when trust is misplaced or when people miss chances to trust others fairly.”